Smart Government

The current and past years have witnessed massive storms, earthquakes, unprecedented forest fires, emergencies, and other urgent situations. Hurricane Sandy, an event that many scientists believe is attributable to climate change that may continue to impact the severity of storms, was an eye opener for many government agencies. Although the public received warnings and prepared days before the storm’s destruction, the aftermath created power outages impacting communications, availability of potable water and gasoline, and pervasive need for food, warm clothing, and shelter. Successful response and recovery operations require the ability to shift services from multiple agencies into a high gear while maintaining tight control of all resources, rapid coordination of different sectors, and the communication of critical information before, during, and after the emergency. Frequently, it's after an emergency that federal state and local agencies discover that they require expansive sharing of information, collaboration, and coordination of services to recover, rebuild, and restore communities to normalcy.

A recent article, HUD official coordinated Hurricane Sandy recovery aid - The Washington Post highlights the "after emergency " coordination of federal agencies through the establishment of a Hurricane Sandy task force that coordinated 23 federal agencies and offices as well as collaborated with state, local and nonprofit agencies in dispensing the nearly $50 billion appropriated by Congress. Marion Mollegen McFadden, chief operating officer, and later acting executive director of the task…

A few weeks ago, this space included a blog entry titled All Data is Local, as Local Governments Become Innovation Leaders That piece looked at some leaders in growth of new local-level data collection. It also mentioned an upcoming IDC report focusing on the new wave of local data.

That report, titled The Last Domino — Metro Area Small Cell (MASC) Networks and the New Cascade of Gov "Big Data in Motion" is now available.

Here is some background.

The public sector is seeing rapid growth of new data sources. Much of this data is related to the emerging devices used by Smart City applications, border management solutions, and campus-centric information gathering. To gather and properly channel this data, government is increasingly relying on the presence of government owned or leased small cell networks in urban and border areas. We use the term government owned Metropolitan Area Small Cell, or “MASC networks” to describe this arena.

The arrival of these new types of highly localized data resources and data collection points is having a big impact on government data management. New edge devices, including sensors, security monitoring systems, and the world's ever-expanding Internet of Things (IOT), are creating a rapidly expanding set of "data-in motion" that is quickly growing to hundreds of terabytes or even petabytes within many jurisdictions.

Potentially, all data in motion can be tracked, evaluated, directed to…

Governments around Europe are busy innovating the way they deliver services to citizens. Innovation is not only coming in the form of new digital channels, but as a more comprehensive approach to redefining the citizen experience.

Governments around Europe are busy innovating the way they deliver services to citizens. Innovation is not only coming in the form of new digital channels, but as a more comprehensive approach to redefining the citizen experience. This will require the reconciling of four sometimes conflicting but inextricably linked views of citizen experience:

The government executive view that aims to leverage technology to reduce total expenditure through self-service, but sometimes fails to take into…

The student experience was drastically reshaped by technology in the past forty years. Third platform technologies, including not only mobile, but also cloud, big data and social, enable students interact with peers and teachers while in the classroom, at home, or while sitting at the campus café working on a group project. Schools and universities are moving to adapt to the change and offer an improved learning experience.

The student experience was drastically reshaped by technology in the past forty years. Students moved from learning basic computer skills in a dedicated laboratory to having one computer per classroom, to one computer for each of them, to owning five or more devices - some personal and some provisioned by schools and universities.

Third platform technologies, including not only mobile, but also cloud, big data and social, enable students interact with peers and teachers while in the classroom,…